Reviews Blog

I have built a very serious home media PC based on Microsoft Medica Center Edition 2005 and I am pretty happy with it. The DVR functionality is not as good as that of my Tivo, but I am sure that with a little time, those things will get worked out. Most people using this setup have Tivos or are converting from Tivo, so there are a lot of voices saying the same things. The benefits are having much more flexibility and access to other media with MCE 2005. I have over 250 movies that I have compressed from DVD to Divx format. These take up anywhere from 700MB to 1GB each and look great on the screen. If I want to play a DVD I just pop one in like I would before. Maybe a DVD jukebox interface will be put together allowing MCE users to have access to hundreds of their DVDs rather than one or two at a time. But, that is for later.

One of the coolest features of Windows MCE 2005 is that you can use it to distribute all of your media to any location in your house via wired or wireless ethernet. Nothing is going to beat a wire and if you want the best quality, then you will need to run cables to all of your rooms. But, you can use these MCE Extender boxes to gain access to all of your media with the same MCE interface on screen. This also removes the requirement of you having to have a computer in your living room…as so many people refer to it. Noise levels are back to where they were. Even if you are only using MCE on one television right now, an Extender is a great option if you want to keep everything out of the living room (or whereve you are watching tv) or you want to use the computer for other things while watching television or movies. This is something that people were able to do with pre-release versions of Windows Media Center Edition 2005, but the standard release does not allow for more than one session to run at a time.

So, to sum it up, get yourself an extender box if you are running MCE 2005. You will be happy, your wife will be happy, and you can use your computer when she is watching something you don’t want to.

Just found a pretty cool site that is providing up to the minute music news for just about every major artist out there. The site is called Pawow Music News and from what I can tell they are aggregating news from a very large number of news sources on line. At first I thought they were some kind of scapper site that was simply grabbing RSS feeds and posting them on their site, but it appears that they actually crawl the news sites and grab the information for themselves. Anyway, it is a pretty cool concept. But, the site design needs some serious work.

Bluetooth wireless technology is one of the coolest things to hit the technology markets in a long time. The technology itself is not new, but many electronics manufacturers have embraced it and included it in their consumer products like cell phones, computers and printers in the past couple of years. Plus, Microsoft’s Windows XP has great out of the box Bluetooth support allowing for easy installation and configuration of Bluetooth enabled devices. I bought myself a Linksys Bluetooth adapter last year and it has been nothing but a joy to use. It offers easy setup and great range with its large external antenna. The only drawback to the Linksys Bluetooth adapter, if there is one, is that it is a little larger than many of the smaller USB adapters that are available. There are some great USB Bluetooth adapters from D-Link and some smaller, lesser known companies that are great for older laptops that do not have built-in Bluetooth radios.

The bottom line is that if you own a new mobile phone, chances are that it has a Bluetooth radio built in. This will allow you to easily connect and sync your phone with popular contact managers like Microsoft Outlook in a matter of minutes. Then it can take place without you even initiaing a sync automatically any time your phone is within range. I do this with my Nokia 6620 and I never have to worry about my phone or my computer having updated information.

Bluetooth is also being used for wireless keyboards, headphones and a myriad of other wireless devices that are used within 30 feet of their bases.